Memory devices with charge-trapping layers, especially SONOS memory cells comprising oxide-nitride-oxide layer sequences as storage medium, are usually programmed by channel hot electron injection. U.S. Pat. No. 5,768,192 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,011,725 disclose charge-trapping memory cells of a special type of so-called NROM cells, which can be used to store bits of information both at the source and at the drain below the respective gate edges. The programmed cell is read in reverse mode to achieve a sufficient two-bit separation. Erasure is performed by hot hole injection. The current consumption of each cell during programming with fully driven transistor is about 100 μA. An increment of charges towards the middle channel region significantly reduces the number of possible programming cycles. Therefore, it is not possible to shrink the cell to the sub-100-nm technology since the increasing amount of charges in the middle channel region cannot be completely neutralized during the reprogramming process. Thus, the performance of the memory cell will deteriorate with an increasing number of programming cycles.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0185055 A1 and a corresponding paper of C. C. Yeh et al., “PHINES: A Novel Low Power Program/Erase, Small Pitch, 2-Bit per Cell Flash Memory”, 2002 IEEE, disclosed a non-volatile semiconductor memory cell with electron-trapping erase state, which is operated as flash memory and is able to store two bits. The erasure takes place by Fowler-Nordheim tunneling of electrons from either channel or gate electrode into the storage layer of a conventional charge-trapping layer sequence, for example an ONO layer sequence. In programming this memory, electric holes are injected into the non-conducting charge-trapping layer. Hot hole injection can be induced at source and drain, which means, at both ends of the channel. This operating method avoids high programming currents. The difficulty to neutralize charges trapped above the middle channel region results in a small programming window in different programming states within the same cell of less than about 1.5 V. This again is not advantageous for scalability.